Common Sense in New Hampshire

When David Bates, a New Hampshire state representative, first introduced a bill aimed at overturning the state’s marriage equality law, he was dismissive of public opinion polling that showed about 60 percent of New Hampshire residents opposed repeal.

During an impassioned debate in the legislature on Wednesday, another lawmaker, Rep. Warren Goern, also said those polls did not reflect the sentiments of the state.

So Mr. Bates and Mr. Goern don’t trust polls; fair enough. Perhaps they think elected representatives, presumably in regular communication with their constituents, are better than pollsters at gauging the mood of the state?
If so, they’re out of luck. On Wednesday, the legislature rejected Mr. Bates’s bill—which would have replaced same-sex marriages with civil unions, and allowed New Hampshirites to weigh in on the issue through a nonbinding November ballot question—by a vote of 211-116. That’s more than 60 percent.

But what a majority of New Hampshire residents want, or don’t want, is really a side issue. Yesterday, New Hampshire’s elected leaders recognized that “the rights of the people are not subjected to popular vote,” in the words of Rep. Keith Murphy, a Republican from Bedford, where Republicans are decidedly not liberals.

Another Republican, Rep. Cameron De Jong, rose in the chamber to declare: “God is my judge and today I ask you to support equal rights under the law”—an especially welcome statement given that, far too often, activists use religion to justify intolerance or discrimination.

I hope Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey is paying attention, although I’m fairly sure he’s not. Mr. Christie is trying to engineer a state referendum on marriage, using that as a sorry excuse for his decision to veto a same-sex marriage law passed by the state legislature earlier this year.

Anti-marriage groups – most of them not from California – managed to get voters in California to approve a ballot measure repealing the state’s marriage equality law, only to have the courts say what Mr. Murphy said: Voters should not have the power to take away a minority group’s rights.

New Hampshire lawmakers defeated another bill on Wednesday. It would have outlawed marriage between two left-handed people and was introduced to make an obvious point. New Hampshire lawmakers got that point, 2-to-1.